By Nick Nitkowski

I’m sure by now we all know of the infamous CG adult animated film “Sausage Party” where food is sentient and longs to be bought by humans to take them to the great beyond where they believe they will live the rest of their days in paradise only to discover that they’re really being devoured in the most brutal ways possible. I personally had a lot of fun with “Sausage Party”… at other people’s expense. I can’t begin to tell you how many people I made watch this movie just to see their priceless reactions to the movie’s… climax.

Now, here we are eight years later and we now have a “Sausage Party” series streaming on Amazon Prime. Whereas the movie dealt with the concept of religion and belief, this new series takes a bite out of modern society. If you know, you know. Along with all the raunchiness and curse words you would expect at this point. Instead of releasing each episode gradually over time, all eight episodes are currently streaming together for your viewing pleasure. So, how does this second course fair?

It’s easy to say that if you were a fan of the movie, you’d definitely enjoy this series. It has more of what you would expect as well as some things you probably wouldn’t expect. At the start of the first episode, I was a little concerned about it just rehashing what the original film had already done. But as it went on, it definitely explored a lot of different things. Some of which I will never be able to unsee. Needless to say, this is definitely not for everyone. And please don’t let your kids stumble upon it on your Amazon Prime account by accident. 

The story once again follows Frank the Hotdog along with his lover-bun Brenda and his friends Barry and Sammy Bagel Jr. After finally freeing themselves from their human oppressors, they now have the chance to build their society free of humans. But once they discover that their society is starting to fall apart, they seek ways to try to fix it and make it a true Foodtopia for all food. 

Seth Rogen, Kirsten Wiig, Michael Cera, and even Edward Norton have returned to voice their characters from the previous film in this new series. And we have some new character voices like Sam Richardson as an Orange and Will Forte as a human. Some of the actors who didn’t return for this new course include Bill Hader, Craig Robinson, and Salma Hayek. There’s nothing noteworthy to say about the voice acting in this series. The only thing I noticed is that it sounded like Edward Norton was delivering his lines a lot less enthusiastically in this series than he did in the movie. You can just hear it in his voice throughout.

I can also say that the animation, while close to that of the film, you can tell that it was downgraded a bit when compared to the film. It wasn’t quite a “Megamind 2” level downgrade, but it seemed like less quality than its predecessor which was already nowhere near Disney/PIXAR level. Not too different but different enough to know that the animators had less to work with this time around. But still managed to capture the same spirit in terms of animation.

Overall, I can say at the very least I had fun watching “Sausage Party: Foodtopia.” I liked some of the ideas that it had as well as the social commentaries it decided to tackle. Definitely got a few laughs out of me. And there was one particular scene in one particular episode that was a whole lot to digest! It’s weird, it’s ridiculous, it’s raunchy, it’s immature, but you we all knew that already. So, you’re either on board for this insane smorgasbord, or you can take yourself to go spend your time watching something else. Would I recommend this show to someone? Probably not unless they’ve already seen the movie and therefore know what they’re getting themselves into. I don’t know who was asking for this and I don’t know who ordered it, but it has been served, and I ate.  

3 stars